Fever Pitch - Book Review

Review of Fever Pitch - Nick Hornby, 1992, 242 p.

Fever Pitch was voted the best sports book of all time by Guardian-Observer in a survey a couple of years back (beating out books like Beyond a Boundary). It surprised me that I had not heard about the book till I came upon this list. I picked up the book with some trepidation as I am not a great football fan, though I do catch the occasional EPL or Champions League matches. However one thing which enthused me was that the book was about an Arsenal fan and whatever little I have followed of the EPL, I have always been an Arsenal follower.

Fever Pitch is an autobiography – a growing up story of the author set against the backdrop of the the author’s love and later obsessive interest in the Arsenal football club and how the key moments of his life, professional and personally, intertwine with the (mis)fortunes of the club. The book is structured innovatively with memories broken down into specific match days which is in fact representative of the author’s own mental condition where all his memories have an Arsenal backdrop. This is a great instance of the structure being used not for style alone but because the author’s life has flown that way.

For all Arsenal haters, (even though some of whom would have been won over by the exciting football which the team has been playing under Arsene Wenger), this book is not about Arsenal alone. It could have been any other club. Even for Hornby, Arsenal was just serendipity. It just happened to be the first match he saw at a ground, it just could have been Chelsea or Man U if he went to Stamford Bridge of Old Trafford that fateful day. Hornby’s dad had recently split up with his mother and in the first instance of the lifelong linkages between football and his personal life, parental weekend visits for his father end up at Highbury. Football gradually starts filling the gap left by his father and starts being a metaphor for his life.

Hornby likes the whole scene – going in the football special trains, the noise, the ability to hide oneself in crowds and consequently the power of groups, the braggadocio. Arsenal during this time was not a particularly successful team and hated by quite a few because of their dismal record and their dour style. Hornby parallels his own life here as just an average student at school. His obsession has already acquired manic proportions. For a brief while when he is about to leave for college, he leaves the ground misty-eyed as he feels that Cambridge and being 18 offered the prospect of Sartre, Van Morrison and being in bed with “young, rapacious, art students” and hence Arsenal had to go. He is back though in a few weeks excited at the prospect of a new manager and new sign-ons.

Hornby falls in love and out of it, gets out of Cambridge with average grades, takes up some odd jobs without any consistency and generally hangs around with the aimlessness of art students. His obsession for all things Arsenal becomes like an addiction to him. When he describes his state of life here, you can replace football with say “cocaine” and you are talking the same thing. He does not feel happy at these matches and instead he feels terribly depressed, his nerves are shreds and fingers are stubs, his lungs are full of nicotine, when he is not able to go to Highbury his heart is torn, even though he is at a friend's wedding or a job interview. All symptoms of a full blown drug addiction.

Frustrated by his lack of success in love and career, he even goes to a shrink but, in true addictive fashion, he slicks away one day to attend an Arsenal match which actually ends up reviving him. This is a turning point in the book when he starts thinking of his life and Arsenal as separate, each important in its own way.

Hornby examines a whole lot of issues, important and trivial, with an easy style. The most important for me, just when I have been upto 2 a.m to see India lose to Bangladesh in the World Cup, is what drives people to emotionally invest a big part of their lives in a particular team and especially a losing one. As Hornby views it simply, they have no option. Its not like they had a choice. They were given a team and they stuck with it, through joys and sorrows and disappointments and euphoria. He says being a fan is not that different from a job, with its attendant stresses, joys, losses etc. and it is not about entertainment which the fans do not seek anyway. This is an important point – when viewed against the backdrop of so many cricket experts asking us to enjoy the game irrespective of who wins. How many of us can appreciate Miandad’s last ball six in Sharjah? Okay that was a lusty heave, but still. Hornby feels that would be just expecting too much from a fan and that watching sports for entertainment alone is devaluing the importance of fandom and that lambasting football as boring is like criticizing King Lear for its tragic ending. ”For the committed fan, entertaining football exists in the same way as those trees that fall in the middle of the jungle, you presume it happens, but you are not in a position to appreciate it”.

There is not an issue that a fan misses out and Hornby doesn’t too – racism, television broadcasts, stadium facilities, hooliganism all get his treatment in a thoroughly sensitive and entertaining manner.

Hornby also touches upon the 80s tragedies at Heysel and Hillsborough and how he feels that football would take a different turn for the English clubs after these disasters, especially the latter with some of the smaller clubs losing out with expensive regulatory compliances, bigger clubs getting bigger and better facilities and stadiums. Fever Pitch was written in 1992. Hornby was remarkably prescient in foreseeing this change. As we now know, Premier League was formed in 1992, television broadcasting rights were sold to Sky in 1992, bigger clubs earned higher revenues ensuring better facilities and the best players. Pity that close to 100 had to die at Hillsborough to achieve that.

Another important, light hearted take is on the difference between men and women on their obsessions, particularly with sports. He feels that for men, their passions and obsessions define their personality more than they do for women. He is spot on when he says that women are only obsessive about people (which may also keep changing) while for men, they get stuck onto passions and continue with it. Just as Hornby says that he is yet to come across a female football fan who musters the time to go to Plymouth on a working day (Wednesday), I am yet to come across too many women who can see an India vs Bangladesh test match which is petering to a tame draw. In a nutshell, there are more “anally retentive” men than women.

The funniest part of the book (even though it only 4 pages) and one of the most perceptive instances of obsessive behaviour is reserved for his discussion on the ultimate male fantasy of a female partner who is a sports addict and how Hornby tries to reclaim territorial domination using his 18 years obsession to browbeat a partner who is only a 4 month fan through a subtle mix of over-reaction, sulking, juvenile behaviour and general misanthropy. Witness this excerpt: (on his partner saying that dreaded “it’s only a game” thing) – “ ‘You don’t understand,’ I shouted as I had wanted to shout for months and it was true – she didn’t, not really. And I think that once I had been given this opportunity, once I had uttered the words that most football fans carry around like a kidney donor card, it was all over. What was she left with? …….i can safely say that I am top Arsenal dog in this house, and that when and if we have children, it will be my bottom exclusively that fills our season ticket seat. I’m ashamed, of course I’m ashamed, that I have to play dirty like this, but for a while back there I was beginning to worry.”

This is a slim book, only 240 pages long but every page incisive in its social commentary and acerbic in its wit and observations. Such a cynically humourous, mostly depressing and largely pessimistic book could have only been written by a Brit. This one is a masterpiece. Hats off, Hornby.